Customer Reviews

QuarkXPress5 for Dummies

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While I'm sure rsmz56 from New York didn't care for this book, a quick perousal of other reader comments at sites such as Barnes & Noble show that a strong majority of readers find QuarkXPress 5 for Dummies an excellent tutorial and primer. Obviously, as a coauthor of the book, I have a vested interest, but the book does not, as rsmz56 claims, provide such obvious advice as saying that the Colors feature lets you select colors. The book's goal is to explain how the features work and how you should and should not use them, and the feedback over all three editions of this book is that we succeed in providing that why and how knowledge not available in the manual.

What happens when a former Quark employee and a computer business editor team to write a book for us dummies? You get a book that hypes the attributes and capabilities of the program but never delivers with real user-friendly sit-down and work with the program advice. Quark can do this! Quark can do that! Quark is marvelous because... You get plenty of hype about what the features are all about but for those of us brand new to the program it does not serve as a practical guide. You'll get explanations to painfully obvious options (color lets you select the color you want... duh.) However, you won't find out how to use these applications without jumping to other chapters repeatedly - and even then the basics of how it works on a real document is often missing. This is a program for publishing, so why not have a publisher explain how he or she uses it. The Dummies Series, along with other series (now including Adams Media's Everything Series) are pent on using "experts" to write and as evidenced here, an expert might know every bell and whistle about the subject, but is not necessarily able to explain the topic to the layperson.
Also, having a figure on one page and explaining it two pages earlier or later leaves something to be desired. "Layout", it's simple, but part of publishing! I found this to be a frustrating guide at best.

I have used quite a few "Intro to" books to learn various applications, and this one is at the bottom of the list. Granted, some of this may be due to the fact that I'm not overly enamored with QuarkXPress itself, but this book does it no favors. Information is not organized well,and the index isn't helpful.
In short, the book doesn't do a good job of teaching Quark as a whole, AND if you are looking for help on a particular topic, its almost impossible to find. Now, to be fair I haven't read some of the other Quark books, so they may all have this problem, but I found this book to be below the standards of other training books I've used in the past.